Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Millionaire Byrd* knew hard times as a youth; plain-born Lawyer-Politician Almond is far from wealthy). Almond has described the organization as well as anyone: "It's like a club, except it has no bylaws, constitution or dues. It's a loosely knit association, you might say, between men who share the philosophy of Senator Byrd." Almond need only have added what he himself learned the hard way: that those who deviate from the Byrd philosophy soon cease to be gentlemen by organization standards...
...flunky or errand boy, but as a man who can be trusted to keep Virginia the way Harry Byrd wants to keep it, Lindsay Almond was in full charge of the explosive political program of using legal stratagems to keep Negro children out of white schools...
...young state senator who was campaigning in 1925 for Governor. "I had admired his career in the state senate," recalls Lindsay Almond, "and I knew that he was the kind of man politically who would go places." Almond determined to go places right along with Harry Flood Byrd...
...same time the state be permitted to pay private school tuition for all white students who objected to integration or whose schools had been closed. In Europe on Senate business, Harry Byrd received a copy of the Gray Plan by mail from his son Harry Jr. A sincere segregationist, Harry Byrd could also see the political hay to be made out of fighting for a lily-white Virginia. In that sense, the Gray Plan had a fatal flaw: in such liberal cities as Norfolk and Alexandria, local authorities might permit a few Negro children to sit in white classrooms...
...Harry Byrd was much too shrewd to jump out front with objections to the Gray Plan. Before it or any harsher program could be put into effect, a change was required in one section of the Virginia constitution that prohibited the "appropriation of public funds" for "any school or institution of learning not owned or exclusively controlled by the state." On the pretext of support for the Gray Plan with its fatal flaw, the Byrd organization fought hard for a constitutional amendment. Leading the way was Attorney General Lindsay Almond, a stem-winding stump orator, who thundered at Appomattox that...